Child finance: Furthering financial access and education to children and youth

Creating an ecosystem that allows children and youth to become financially secure, aware and develop the skills first hand that will help them break the cycle of poverty.

Children and Youth under and including the age of 18 in all countries, with a particular focus on the vulnerable and marginalized.

Children and youth are the future economic actors whose financial decisions will dictate the state of world economies. Promoting a positive financial culture in children and youth is essential to ensuring a financially literate population, capable of making well-informed decisions and protecting themselves from financial vulnerability. ChildFinance seeks to ensure a generation of financially capable children and youth grow up to be responsible investors and entrepreneurs, empowered to make the necessary positive changes in their lives and in their communities. ChildFinance will also work to enhance public/private relationships between financial institutions, governments, communities and NGOs.

Currently there is no effort addressing ChildFinance either on this scale or with this holistic approach.

Therefore, we are building a global movement to bring attention to the financial needs of children and to bring in the views of a diverse set of stakeholders with a shared vision and commitment. The movement has already started. Governments and their agencies, central banks, regulatory authorities, multi-lateral institutions, financial institutions, NGOs, academics and others have all signed on are actively engaged to help support this goal.

A detailed review of the field of financial education has shown that many organizations focus on one piece of the puzzle, for example, promoting entrepreneurship, providing financial education, or advocating for children’s savings accounts at birth. We believe that all these efforts deserve to be raised to greater prominence, and linked to safe, ChildFriendly banking services. This is the gap ChildFinance will fill – a way for a broad range of stakeholders committed to both financial education and children’s rights to advocate and establish ChildFriendly banking services.

Our goal is to reach 100 million children in 100 countries by 2015.

ChildFinance is working with central banks and financial regulatory authorities to encourage the creation of country level networks that promote social and financial education and financial access. While our focus is on building the financial capability and access for children and youth, we believe that the creation of such networks can also address the issue of adult financial literacy and financial access. Furthermore, our current focus is on the development of basic savings accounts for children. Through these platforms, we also encourage innovation and scale -up so as to include additional banking products and services

90 % Donor Organizations and Governmental support, 10 % Membership fees